The research supported under this grant centers on two critical aspects of speech perception in normal subjects. The first is an investigation of the role of syntactic structure and prosodic features in perceptual segmentation of heard speech on the sentence and clausal level. Studies of segmentation strategies for normal and time-compressed speech are being used to examine segmentation as a potential means of reducing perceptual and memory processing demands in ongoing speech perception. The second aspect of this research is concentrating on an investigation of the theoretical construct of a limited capacity central processor as it might apply to the perception of speech under high load and overload conditions in the presence of concurrent activities. The results of these studies are intended to have potential applicability to methods of study and assessment of cases of debilitated function in language processing and processing capacity in neurological patients and others with perceptual and/or communicative disorders.